Sunday, December 2, 2012
He's been missing from Pittsburgh since March 1993, though he was reported in New York City and possibly San Francisco a few weeks after he disappeared.
Oakland is teeming with college students on any given day as students from Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and Carlow cross back and forth between traffic as they go to and from classes. Andrew Karis was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1993, when he disappeared on a March day. He was last seen on March 1, then, suddenly, he was missing from among those crowds of students. Also known by the nicknames Andy, Drew and Sparky, he was last seen on campus on March 1 that year. When he was reported missing, authorities tracked his credit card and telephone records, and determined that he might have purchased a Greyhound bus ticket to New York City. He was 19 years old at the time of his disappearance and would be 39 …
Sunday, November 25, 2012
These cases in the Pittsburgh area did not have a happy ending but finding those missing persons might have brought closure to families.
As early as this July, people in the law enforcement community knew that the remains of Amanda Sue Myers of Pittsburgh had been identified through DNA comparison. However, it was only last week when Pittsburgh police finally released the news. In July, two separate sources told Patch that Amanda had been identified but that police wanted to hold off on releasing information until some interviews had been conducted. Amanda, who was 22 at the time of her death, was last seen in Pittsburgh at the end of 1999 but may have been in Florida and Tennessee as late as April 2000. She was not reported missing until 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Known unofficially as Homestead Jane Doe, Amanda was found deceased on Oct…
Sunday, November 18, 2012
The murder of the 30-year-old secretary from Penn Hills has never been solved.
Long Road in Penn Hills gets a fair amount of morning rush hour traffic—school and Port Authority buses, along with commuters leaving their homes and heading for their jobs in Pittsburgh. Weekday mornings, at the end of Long Road, cars often form a line waiting to make a left hand turn at the Churchill Valley Country Club onto Beulah Road. As they drive up the hill, they pass the Blackridge Civic Association clubhouse and then, at the top of the hill, intersect with the Parkway East or Penn Avenue toward Wilkinsburg. When Barbara Jean Lewis graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1964, she had her eye on a secretarial career. Her dream to enter the business world came true. She was a secretary at the downtown Pittsburgh offices of …
Sunday, November 11, 2012
The mother said her daughter had been abducted on the South Side but, later, the mother's boyfriend confessed to burying the toddler in Brookline.
The image of a little girl on a grocery shopping trip with her mother—then suddenly gone. That was happened the day of March 9, 1982 when Melody Childs Thomas told police that her daughter, Nicole Lynn Bryner, 3, had been abducted from a shopping cart at the Giant Eagle supermarket on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Though there were extensive searches, no trace of Nicole was ever found. Then, in 1986, Timothy Widman, Childs' boyfriend at the time, allegedly confessed he had punched Bryner and accidentally killed her. He told police that he and Childs' buried the body in a wooded area along Timberland Road in Brookline. Police searched unsuccessfully for the body. Without it, prosecutors could not pursue the case. But in 1988, a Superior …
Sunday, October 21, 2012
In July 1979, Carol Jursik picked up some groceries on her way home from jogging but vanished just 10 houses from her front porch.
Life seemed like it was on the right path for Carol Jursik that July evening in 1979 as she jogged with a housemate. A nationally ranked college woman fencer and possible contender for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, Carol, 24, was a Penn State graduate student working for the summer at the U.S. Steel Corp. in Monroeville through a cooperative job program. Carol and a friend, Michael Pierce, had jogged 15 miles together the night of July 30 before they separated at roughly 9:15 p.m. about one mile from the home, which had been converted into apartments, on Murrayhill Avenue (also spelled Murray Hill) in Squirrel Hill they shared with four other friends. Carol continued on to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle supermarket on Murray Avenue at …
Sunday, October 14, 2012
A woman's body was discovered in the river at Fox Chapel in 2003, but she has never been identified.
The Allegheny River is pretty in the fall—the colors of the leaves reflect off the water and when the sky is blue, it can look like a picture postcard. But sometimes all that's pretty from a distance isn't as beautiful up close and under the surface. Sometimes the Allegheny River carries litter, tree limbs and other debris from far upstream. A worker saw something in the middle of the river channel off Old Freeport Road, near the Fox Chapel Yacht Club in O'Hara Township, on Oct. 23, 2003 that at night looked like garbage. The next day, at approximately 10 a.m., the (debris) came closer to shore. At that point, a worker suspected that it might be a body and called 911. A woman's body, wrapped in a blue blanket and bound with duct tape, was …
Sunday, September 30, 2012
The 22-year-old Dormont woman was killed in 1989 on her way home from a party in Mt. Lebanon—her mutilated body found in the backyard of a house on Voelkel Avenue near the light rail transit tracks.
Today, 23 years after her death, people in Dormont are still talking about what happened to Catherine Corkery. The 22-year-old left a party in Mt. Lebanon at the Academy Avenue home of Sam Amado on July 22, 1989 and headed home to the apartment she shared with a boyfriend, Tim Rooney, on Ordinance Avenue. But she never made it. Somewhere along the light-rail transit tracks where the "T" runs, Corkery met her attacker. She was just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed just 100 pounds. That person twisted a rope-like restraint around her throat and pulled her to the tracks, splitting her head open when it struck a rail, the Tribune-Review reported. In a 1997 story, the newspaper quoted Allegheny County Homicide Sgt. Nicholas Bruich, the lead case…
Sunday, September 9, 2012
The Seneca Valley teacher was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010.
Steven Russo, 48, was a popular statistics and calculus teacher at Seneca Valley High School in Jackson Township, Butler County. Students liked his style, including that he used March Madness brackets to teach the statistical probability of winning. His students had even created a page called "I Love Mr. Russo and His Russo-isms" on Facebook. That Facebook page turned into a place where students poured out their sympathies and memories after Russo was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway (Route 19) in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010. A neighbor told the Post-Gazette that Russo had returned from school for lunch the day before and discovered an intruder in the home. The person just ran out of the house, the neighbor said…
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The 1-year-old was last seen in the front yard of his West End home in 1986.
Jamie Martin Thornton was a little more than a month shy of his second birthday as he played in the front yard of his home in the West End of Pittsburgh on Oct. 4, 1986. But when his birthday arrived on Nov. 12 that year, Jamie, whose nickname was "J.T," wasn't there to celebrate it. Some reports say he disappeared in Chartiers Creek. There is very little information available on his case, other than the standard online listings on the Pennsylvania Missing Persons, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, NamUs and The Doe Network. He is considered one of the "endangered missing." Today, he would be 27 years old. In a March 7, 2011 story, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Jamie's mother, Gloria Steffens of Overbrook, became …
Sunday, July 22, 2012
A baby boy found dead on Neville Island in 1999 has never been identified.
Most babies are brought into the world wanted, cared for and loved. But there are some babies who aren't that lucky. On April 11, 1999, some buzzards circling near the river's edge caught the attention of two employees doing a security check on the 3-11 p.m. shift at Pittsburgh Gear Co., a manufacturing company on Neville Island. As they walked down a rutted path toward the banks of the Ohio River, they saw what drew the buzzards' attention—the lifeless body of a baby boy caught in the rocks and twigs in very shallow water off to the side of an old boat ramp. Part of his umbilical cord was still attached. According to an April 12, 1999 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the men called police. Law enforcement officials said at the time …
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Akasha Brandt
5:47 pm on Sunday, July 22, 2012
This is an excellent article Zandy! more ›